I've always imagined ectoplasm as being sort of like dimensionally processed & condensed leftover thought & emotion. Like, ambient, stray thoughts & lingering emotional surplus in the human world gets sucked through natural portals into the ghost zone, where their combined, processed & condensed into ectoplasm. The Infinite Realms being the sort of necronexus or way station of the multiverse, takes that all in & expands infinitely so long as there are people out there who think & feel.
that's really interesting. gonna take a sec to get into real life theories but i've always thought that there's probably a sort of residue from emotion is real life. like humans are constantly creating emotions, through chemical reactions, and it's been shown that tears are our bodies way of flushing chemicals from our system when we produce too much. tears have different chemical make up depending on what you're feeling while crying. but emotions can also make us sweat and breath heavy so i figured we'd probably be letting out emotional chemicals that way too. because not everyone cries where they have strong feelings.
the logical extension to that in my head is that the chemicals we sweat and breath and cry out end up in our environment. probably rarely a significant enough mean anything, but you'll see it sometimes in places of great tragedy, there will be a sort of miasma in the area, like you can feel the grief and pain or anger. that could be explained by the event releasing a large amount of whatever chemicals are associated with negative feelings. it would also explain empathy to an extent. people with high empathy are just sensitive to those hormones/chemicals. nothing paranormal about it.
so with this scenario the idea is that those chemicals or miasma's end up in the 'ghost zone' and manifests as ectoplasm. or the emotions themselves attach to the pre-existing energy. ghosts would therefore be echoes of a traumatic death or moment of huge passion, where there would be a significant release of emotional chemicals. or in the case of the god like characters, millions of peoples thoughts and feelings and prayers towards their god, manifest into one singular being.
there is definitely a logic to this idea. though how exactly a separate dimension came to exist that's exclusively the manifestation and by products of emotion is a bit beyond me. that gets into where dimensions themselves come from. i'd also like to now why the emotions are going their and not just sticking around on earth. how do dimential tears work in this case. is the ghost zone a layer to our own dimension, or is it like a bubble attached to ours just taking things in. i imagine there's legitimate physics to it, and someone smarter than me could theorize how it works.
halfa's themselves are also very strange if this is the case but also that much more fascinating, because danny canonically had ectoplasm fuse to his body. and vlad had ectoplasmic radiation poisoning. which also... the fact that ectoplasm is radioactive in it's own way is it's own physics question. where does ectoplasm get it's energy? i suppose with that in mind the theory that the goo exists and is just effected my emotional chemicals makes more sense. like there's this bubble dimension attached to ours that we're throwing emotions at and it's manifesting in weird unexpected ways. i suppose that makes the most sense so far. again i don't know physics. either way danny and vlad literally took in the goo and now have powers manifesting because of their emotions. and it would probably be safe to say that their emotions are amplified?
why does ectoplasm manifest specifically as the powers the characters have. why is flying, invisibility, and intangibility standard manifestations of ectoplasm? why does it give their ghosts powers at all? the gods makes a bit more sense? by why would a persons passion and greed for boxes manifest as a being who can control boxes? is it wish granting? does the ectoplasm just follow the desires behind these emotions? why and why do they still get the standard power set if that has nothing to do with the ghost's wish? why does extoplasm behave the way that it does? i'm curious now.
also gotta point out the irony of the fenton's ongoing claim that ghosts can't feel anything when if this is the case, ghosts are nothing but feelings. wild - Hestia